October camping trip 2026

Lake Inawashiro at sunset

Last week we spent four days camping in the Fukushima Prefecture next to the fourth largest lake in Japan: Lake Inawashiro (for the record, we've now seen three of the four largest, and camped next to two of them, this one and Lake Biwa). It is about 280 km north of us in Tokyo.

Rice fields being harvested as we drove north.

We stopped at an expressway service area
and ate traditional "Service Area food".
David accidentally ordered the largest dish on
the menu. All this for about AU$25. There was
more rice here than the two of us would eat in
a single meal. He didn't finish it all!

We drove up on Tuesday, with our usual camping friends, though for only the second time of camping together we had no kids camping with us. When we arrived it was pretty windy and I was having flashbacks to our most recent camping trip where we ended up going home a day early because our camping set-up was overwhelmed with wind and rain on the second night. We were very careful about the angle that we set up our tent, trying to protect the pole that got damaged in March. But thankfully the wind started to die down as the sun set and it never picked up again through our whole stay.

So much space in our little car!

Kebabs on our surprisingly spacious
portable fire pit.

Wednesday was a pretty quiet day. It rained in the morning and was cloudy and cool all day. We strolled around the large campsite (100+ sites) and enjoyed gazing at the lake and spent time reading after lunch. 

After our last trip we threw away our cheap little wood fire stove and bought a brand-new higher quality portable fire pit. We had a lot of fuel with us, so we ended up playing with fire most of the day. It was relaxing and a great "circuit breaker" to help us get into relaxing mode. Dinner was chicken kebabs and fire-roasted veggies followed by Apple Crisp cooked over the fire! (Fire and food cooked over the fire is the best thing about camping, we don't starve!)

Moss!

This impressive plant is called
"Jack-in-the-pulpit".

Moody lake views.

Thursday dawned bright and sunny. Our friend Mark, had, as usual, brought his bike and prepared to ride all the way around the lake. His ride ended up being about 60 kilometres. As is common in this country, at times the mountains descended straight into the lake, so the road wasn't at water-level all the way around so he had a fair bit of climbing to do, and contrary to what seems logical, he tells us he had a headwind the whole way!

While Mark was off riding, the rest of us walked around a large park across the road from the campsite. After lunch, we met Mark at a tourist farm for ice cream and then all convened back at the campsite. The evening meal was all about the fire again, and we enjoyed campfire-cooked pizza (using a base made on location from flour, baking powder, water, and then after we loaded the toppings, it was folded into foil for cooking) followed by American S'mores. We're so happy with our new fire pit!

Our location had lots of trees. 

Ice cream :D

Mossy wall in the park

Autumn leaves

So many dragon flies! Hard to photograph,
but they were everywhere around us.

Autumn leaves, blue sky, and Mount Daisan (1,729m)

Our friends brought solar-charged fairy lights, which made our
basic setup kinda pretty. Hard to take a photo of, though.

Thursday night was pretty chilly and to stay warm, I wore most of the clothes that I had on during the day to bed. We ended up in bed really early and got up late due to the chill, such is the camping life!

On Friday we packed up our camp and headed to an nearby tourist spot: a Japanese castle. Actually the real castle was demolished in 1874, but the outside of the tower was rebuilt in 1965. Inside the tower is a (mostly) bilingual museum which told us some of the history of the castle and the area. The castle has stood on this location since the 1500s! It was again humbling to learn just a tiny bit of this nation's complex and long history. It continues to fascinate me at the same time as boggling my mind!

Tsuruga Castle (aka Aizuwakamatsu 
Castle or Wakamatsu Castle)

Then, after a short stop for lunch bought from a convenience store, we turned our cars towards home. It was all going well until we encountered a 15km traffic jam on the expressway that took a couple of hours to clear away (caused by a truck being on fire). We didn't get home until after 7pm. But unlike our last trip, at least we were in the open (not in tunnels) and we'd had a good sleep the night before. We were also thankful that no rain fell on our last two days, so we didn't have much cleanup to do once we got home. 

I'm so thankful that we decided to go the "camping route" 15 years ago. We've seen much more of Japan than we otherwise would have. We also frequently note that the act of camping creates a kind of weird time warp. Four days away feels like much more, mostly because when tent camping you have to focus more on daily living, like making fire, keeping dry/warm, ensuring the tent stays up, etc. It takes your mind away from the things that usually occupy our minds at home.

Our next touring adventure is only a couple of months away. It will be cooler so we won't take our tents, but instead plan to make use of the little rustic cabins that these campsites frequently have to rent. Stay tuned for our mid-December road trip!

Finishing off our home assignment in Perth

I'm dropping in here quickly from Western Australia. We've been very busy since we got back from holidays just over two weeks ago. In Queensland we spoke at a church and two Bible/theological colleges before flying to Perth (five and a half hours) last Friday. In Perth on Sunday we spoke at two churches. This coming weekend we've got four more speaking opportunities before we fly to Tokyo on Monday.

In between all these up-front opportunities we've been meeting various people over meals, in fact we're out every night this week except one. It's been a lot and my body is protesting. It's been very encouraging, but also very tiring, despite getting good food and sleep and even some exercise (we've walked nearly 30,000 steps in the last three days). Unlike some missionaries on home assignment, we've only slept in six different beds over the last 11 weeks, and one of those was for a total of about seven weeks (in three segments). That's definitely worth being thankful for! But nonetheless, we're longing to be home in our little apartment, and back into our own routines.

It's also been a lot easier doing this HA without any children or teens under our care. We've spent time with them in the last 11 weeks, but then they went back to their own lives (in their own cars to their own homes). Juggling the care of kids while doing speaking on home assignment was the norm for us many years and it's really nice to put that behind us now.

One thing we've continued to do, though, is try to appreciate the localities that we have passed through. This week we've been enjoying Perth. We've been to Kings Park and walked along the nearby stunning rivers (Canning and Swan). Our hosts even took us to Fremantle to enjoy fish and chips (but it was at night, so we saw little of this historic city). Here are some photos from our recent outings:

Canning River and a Coral Tree.

Perth and the Swan River from Kings Park

Fraser Ave in Kings Park

False Sarsparilla or Native lilac (Australian native)

More Swan River

Pink (or Hill) gum, viewed from the Federation Walkway

A portion of the elevated walkway

Queensland Boab tree

Ornamental pincushion (native to southern Africa)

The above sign describes the below flower—an astoundingly large flower on a gum tree.

Close up of the Coral Tree flower

Another gum tree in silhouette. 

The soil here is very sandy, hence river-side beaches aren't uncommon.

Can you see the Black Swans, the birds the river is named after?

Time to rest (and move)

One of the biggest challenges of a short, fast-paced home assignment is getting rest. We've designated each Monday as a day off and have that written on our online shared calendar. It's important to decide that beforehand otherwise a dangerous "creep" can happen and you end up with not enough time to truly rest. Also, we're trying to have a mentality that downtime can happen at other times too. This week we have meetings on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. It'll be wise to have rest time during the day on those days (and probably Friday morning too...after an evening event I often don't sleep well).

Yesterday (Monday), on our designated day off, we went a little further afield for a longer walk. White Rock Conservation Park is not far from our home church in Redbank Plains, Ipswich. We've lived around this area several times in the last 15 years and yet never gone to the park, though I've heard it mentioned many times by people. Yesterday we had good weather, plus the time and energy to go and explore it. We ended up walking seven kilometres through typical Queensland bushland. It was a delightful outing that was good for us on many fronts.

There were so many gorgeous trees, mostly a typical Queensland eucalyptus forest.

The "rock" itself is a sandstone outcrop. We walked from the carpark in to the rock and out again.

We saw a number of kangaroos, but none so close as these two who calmly grazed on grass as we walked within a few metres of them.

When we were almost back to our car we passed this kookaburra. He was perched at head height, only a metre or so off the track and also didn't move as we walked past, pausing to take his photo.

Day 35: Grants Lagoon to Dora Point

We had a visitor towards the end of this day.
A pademelon, which looks quite like a wallaby,
except a bit stockier with a shorter tail.

Our free-free campsite at Grants Lagoon was just one of about half a dozen in close proximity on the coast at Bay of Fires, north of St Helens. Seeing as there seemed to be few camping and no bookings or fees, we decided to pack up and drive around the bay, looking at the sights and seeing if another campsite appealed for the next night. Grants Lagoon was nice, but unless you were planning to swim or kayak, there was not a lot to do or see in the immediate vicinity of where we'd spent the night.

So we drove north as far as the road would take us, to a place curiously called "The Gardens". No, there aren't many gardens there now, but legend has it that it was called that by one of the early influential women who found the area had many wildflowers. At The Gardens there was a short walk/rock scramble where we got our first glimpse of the Bay of Fires. Very beautiful!

More stunning sand and clear water

After that we drove south a little bit, parked, and walked to the end of Taylors Beach and back (a bit over an hour). Then we ate lunch and explored the various free campsites between there and St Helens, settled on one near Binalong Bay township, accessible via a relatively rough dirt road. The campsite was called Dora Point in the Humbug Point Nature Recreation Area. Again, a sparsely populated campsite with no facilities except flushing loos and fenced-off campsites.

A common feature in this section of the coast is
this orange lichen on rocks. 

We went for another walk out to the ocean. My phone said at the end of this day I'd walked nearly 12 km. 

Taylors Beach

We made apple crumble from scratch 
(I cut up the apples and stewed them and
David made the crumble and baked it in our
little oven. It felt like an accomplishment.